"In the past five years, flash memory has progressed from a promising accelerator, whose place in the data center was still uncertain, to an established enterprise component for storing performance-critical data. It's rise to prominence followed its proliferation in the consumer world and the volume economics that followed. With SSDs, flash arrived in a form optimized for compatibility - just replace a hard drive with an SSD for radically better performance. But the properties of the NAND flash memory used by SSDs differ significantly from those of the magnetic media in the hard drives they often displace. While SSDs have become more pervasive in a variety of uses, the industry has only just started to design storage systems that embrace the nuances of flash memory. As it escapes the confines of compatibility, significant improvements in performance, reliability, and cost are possible."

If NVRAM becomes as dirt cheap as DRAM is today, nothing would prevent its use in peripherals and timing circuitry too. The scenario which I describe, getting rid of that suspend kludge at last, can only work if everything that holds state inside of a computer is based on NVRAM.

It's true that environmental dependencies would still have to be taken into account. But these are handled at a higher level than hardware considerations, and can consequently be taken care of in a much cleaner way. Network connections can time out and be brought back, as an example.

If you think of it, a constantly failing wireless network connection should be much more of a hassle to handle than infrequent suspends, and yet if you aren't in a hurry modern OSs can handle that.